The new field of Computational Social Science can be defined as the interdisciplinary investigation of the social universe on many scales, ranging from individual actors to the largest groupings, through the medium of computation. […] Computational social science is based on an informationprocessing paradigm of society. (Cioffi-Revilla 2014, 2)
The Manifesto of Computational Social Science (Conte et al. 2012) argues that computational social science operates with “massive ICT data” (p. 327), conducts “massive data analysis” (p. 330) that operates “up to the whole world population” (p. 331). It is “a new field of science in which new type of data, largely made available by new ICT applications, can be used to produce large-scale computational models of social phenomena” (p. 333). The Manifesto claims that computational social science constitutes “a new era” (p. 327).
Computational social scientists set out to radically transform the social sciences. Computational social science is new positivism. Its methods cannot understand the qualitative features of society such as motivations, norms, moral values, feelings, ideologies, and experiences.
Cioffi-Revilla (2014, 1) explicitly situations computational social science in the context of Auguste Comte’s “natural science of social systems, complete with statistical and mathematical foundations”. Comte was the founder of positivism. Computational social science explicitly stands in the context of positivism. The Manifesto of Computational Social Science argues for turning sociology and the social sciences into a natural science: “sociology in particular and the social sciences, in general, would undergo a dramatic paradigm shift, arising from the incorporation of the scientific method of physical sciences” (Conte et al. 2012, 341).
The danger is that computer science colonises the social sciences and leaves no space and time for critical theory, social theory, and philosophy. The main danger of computational social sciences is that this paradigm makes the social sciences uncritical and turns them into administrative sciences (see Fuchs 2017a). Engels warned in a different context of the dangers of positivism. He argues against a mathematical method that is
reducing qualitative differences to merely quantitative differences […] As Hegel has already shown (Encyclopädie, I, S. 199), this view, this “one-sided mathematical view”, according to which matter must be looked upon as having only quantitative determination, but, qualitatively, as identical originally, is ‘no other standpoint than that’ of the French materialism of the 18th century. It is even a retreat to Pythagoras who regarded quantitative determination as the essence of things. (Engels 1925, 534)
Chapter Two | Friedrich Engels in Digital Capitalism
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Computational Social Science and Scientific Socialism